Fail Of The Week: The SMD Crystal Radio That Wasn’t

The crystal radio is a time-honored build that sadly doesn’t get much traction anymore. Once a rite of passage for electronics hobbyists, the classic coil-on-an-oatmeal-carton and cat’s…

Repairing A Component On A Flex Connector

It used to be you could crack open a TV or radio and really work on the components inside. The smallest thing in there was maybe a disc capacitor a little smaller than your pinky’s nail. Nowa…

Soldering, Up Close And Personal

A word of warning before watching this very cool video on soldering: it may make you greatly desire what appears to be a very, very expensive microscope. You’ve been warned. Granted, most peo…

Slim Tactile Switches Save Classic TI Calculator With A Bad Keypad

For vintage calculator fans, nothing strikes more fear than knowing that someday their precious and irreplaceable daily driver will become a museum piece to be looked at and admired — but nev…

An Arduino Nano Clone In A DIP-Sized Footprint

Nobody doubts the utility of the Arduino Nano and its many clones, and chances are good you’ve got at least one or two of the tiny dev boards within arm’s reach right now. But as small …

Broken Lens Provides Deep Dive Into Camera Repair

While most of us are probably willing to pick up the tools and void the warranty on just about anything, often just to see what’s inside, many of us draw the line at camera gear. The tiny scr…

Soldering The Elusive USB C Port

Many SMD components, including some USB C ports, have their terminals under the component. When installed, the pins are totally hidden. So, how do you solder or unsolder them? That’s the prob…

Hackaday Links: March 31, 2024

Battlelines are being drawn in Canada over the lowly Flipper Zero, a device seen by some as an existential threat to motor vehicle owners across the Great White North. The story started a month or …

A 555-Shaped Discrete Component 555

While the “should have used a 555” meme is strong around these parts, we absolutely agree with [Kelvin Brammer]’s decision to make this 555-shaped plug-in replacement for the 555 …

LED Matrix Earrings Show Off SMD Skills

We’ll be honest with you: we’re not sure if the use of “LED stud” in [mitxela]’s new project refers to the incomprehensibly tiny LED matrix earrings he made, or to him…

Pimp My Pot Redux, Now Cheaper And Even Better

If there’s one thing we like around here more than seeing an improved version of a project we’ve already covered, it’s when the improvements make the original project cheaper. In …

A Compact SMD Reflow Hotplate Powered By USB-PD

When it comes to home-lab reflow work, there are a lot of ways to get the job done. The easiest thing to do perhaps is to slap a PID controller on an old toaster oven and call it a day. But if your…

Leaky SMD Electrolytics? Try These Brute Force Removal Methods

When you say “recapping” it conjures up an image of a dusty old chassis with point-to-point wiring with a bunch of dried-out old capacitors or dodgy-looking electrolytics that need repl…

Solder Two Boards At Once With This Dual Reflow Plate

Homebrew reflow projects generally follow a pretty simple formula: find a thrift shop toaster oven or hot plate, add a microcontroller and a means to turn the heating element on and off, and close …

Pocket CO2 Sensor Doubles As SMD Proving Ground

While for some of us it’s a distant memory, every serious electronics hobbyist must at some point make the leap from working with through-hole components to Surface Mount Devices (SMD). At fi…

An SMD Capacitor Guide

For electronics, your knowledge probably follows a bit of a bell curve over time. When you start out, you know nothing. But you eventually learn a lot. Then you learn enough to be comfortable, and …

RPDot: The RP2040 Dev Board Barely Bigger Than The Chip

Is [William Herr]’s RPDot actually the world’s smallest RP2040 dev board? We can’t say for sure, but at 10 mm on a side, we’d say it has a pretty good shot at the record. No…